External A/D USB converter

HearThis
1

When I installed the latest update to HearThis, I saw the following message when it started up again, and I have some questions about it:

"To use HearThis to record audio Scriptures, you will need the following:

  1. A default recording and playback device capable of high-quality audio. Set up a headset microphone and (probably) an external A/D USB converter…"

There are some products available where I live that are in the USD 5 to 25 range. Is that the kind of thing that was being imagined when this was written? Can anyone show me an example of what this is supposed to mean?
Thanks!

2

Richard Margetts has written a paper called How to do Recording on your Computer. He doesn’t really endorse a lot of specific products (probably in part because this is a rapidly evolving field and the local availability of particular models varies widely), but he does give some good general guidelines. He does recommend against cheap headset microphones and states, “In general, the more you spend on a microphone, the better the quality of the audio recording.”

3

Thanks. We have found that the relatively cheap mobile phone earbuds that come with many phones or can be bought to plug into one’s phone do a pretty good job of noise cancellation, and produce sufficient recording quality for our needs, which are not final recordings that will become the final audio Bible, but rather recordings that will tide us over until then.